Fidel Castro slept with 35,000 women and smoked his first cigar aged 14

11 surprising personal facts about the leader of the Cuban revolution

“It was my own father who gave me my first cigar, back in Birán. I must have been 14 or 15… I smoked that first puro, and I didn’t know how it was done. Fortunately, I didn’t inhale the smoke. Although you always absorb a little bit of the nicotine, even if you don’t inhale at all.”

…but he gave up cigars decades ago

“I’ve smoked too much in my life. Until one day, over 20 years ago, I decided to stop. Nobody made me. I just decided to make myself stop smoking… Listening to people [talk] so much about the necessity of a collective fight against obesity, the sedentary lifestyle, smoking, I became convinced that the sacrifice I should make on behalf of public health in Cuba was to quit smoking. Teach by example. I gave up tobacco, and I’ve never missed it.”

Getty Images

Fidel Castro was a baseball fan

Castro played baseball as a boy in the early Fifties and was an avid fan. After the revolution he banned all professional sports in Cuba, closing the leagues he had played in as a child.

Fidel Castro claimed there were 600 assassination attempts on his life

Fidel Castro claimed that there were up to 600 attempts to kill him, all funded by the United States, and that some came very close to succeeding. Most of the plots, in his own words, were fantastic (and improbable). One of the attempts included a cyanide pill which was about to be put into a chocolate milkshake at coffee place he often frequented, a plan to pump a TV studio full of hallucinogenic drugs when he went to make a speech, and a gun hidden in a camera at an event in Chile.

…and carried a pistol at all times

Castro carried a 15-shot Browning pistol most of his life. Even after he broke his arm and knee in an accident in 2004.

Fidel Castro slept with 35,000 women

The dictator had a rapacious sexual appetite, according to a former Castro insider. The New York Post reported that Castro had sex with at least two women a day; at lunch, dinner and sometimes at breakfast. His guards would prowl the beaches of Havana to recruit women. A Vanity Fair reporter in 2008 revealed that he loved to flirt and littered his speech with crude sexual innuendos. When asked how many children he had, he said, laughing, “Well, I don’t have a tribe. Not that much, fewer than a dozen.”

Fidel Castro was a constant fixture on the Forbes list of the richest rulers in the world, which reported he owned and controlled several enterprises in Havana and had a fortune of at least $500 million.

…but he claimed he was not

Castro claimed “I don’t have a cent of my own.”

Fidel Castro respected US president Kennedy

Castro said decades after Kennedy’s death that the US president was “an intelligent man, sometimes brilliant, brave, and it’s my opinion that if Kennedy had survived, it’s possible that relations between Cuba and the US would have improved.”

…and thought Kennedy’s death was a conspiracy

Castro believed that Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald “may have been a double agent” and questioned how one man could fire so many accurate shots.

Getty Images

Fidel Castro personally wrote all his speeches

“Every time I’ve ever asked someone to write a speech for me, or at least do a draft for me, it’s almost entirely been a disaster – empty, ineloquent. I’ve had to rewrite it entirely. I’ve talked to several advisors to American presidents, who’ve written hundreds of speeches. But it’s still a mystery to me. I’ve never been able to give a speech that I haven’t prepared myself, haven’t written myself. How do the French presidents do it?”

Quotes are from My Life by Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet (Allen Lane), published 2007. Granted unprecedented access to the Cuban leader, Ramonet’s conversations are revealing, including Castro’s thoughts of the CIA’s 600 attempts to end his life.